Monthly Archives: November 2009

As an entrepreneur you are constantly coming up with ideas, some good, some bad, and you are always looking for someone that will buy your story. So, sometimes when a 1st customer, an investor, your parents, or even when a competitor just gets what you are up to feel set free, validated and even empowered. Now, no entrepreneur likes to loose, but sometimes just knowing that someone else is thinking what you are thinking, well, it validates you and your hair brained ideas, and sometimes that feels good.

So, when I saw that eventbrite had revenue of $100 million in what they thought was a $35 billion dollar market place, it kinda gives me goose bumps.

Over 2 years ago I started pitching a company called “Social Helix” and then and now I am still excited about the idea of connecting people thr0ugh events. I always felt like profiles like myspace and facebook were a bit lifeless compared to the real thing. I mean the people we care about, really care about, well we meet them in person don’t we? And when I realized that, I started to get really excited about changing the way events work.

Today, I am working on a few other ideas, some with potential investors, and others are just engineering projects with a possible revenue upside, like http://loc.is, but in those cases, SocialHelix got me in the door, but we never got the money we needed to make it happen.

Sometimes as an entrepreneur you think you are crazy, not because other people tell you so, but you really wonder if your bet is right.

Today I received some validation that I am not crazy when eventbrite announced revenue. Eventbrite claims they have revenue of $100 million ( some of that goes to event curators ), and placed their market size at $35 Billion. $35 billion is an interesting number because that is what we predicted with SocialHelix nearly 2 years ago.

The event space is huge and ticketmaster plays a role in such a small space of it. It’s the classic problem of long tail vs short tail. Ticketmaster went after some of the worlds largest venues, and secured deals with those locations. Large Venue style ticket sales which are usually divided into primary and secondary sales total about $1.5 billion and $6 billion respectively. While movie ticket sales are around $10 billion a year.

Sites like Eventbrite and SocialHelix would rather target long tail sales which are usually personally, or organizationally curated instead of venue curated. In that industry we have several interesting segments, and this market is huge, it so huge that most people don’t think about it. Groups and Meetings which include corporate events, business meetings, and

Launchy is a micro utility that launches when you type ‘alt+space’ ( I set mine to ctrl+space), and then you just start typing the name of the app or web address you want to launch. The app makes it possible to use a lot more of Windows XP without using a mouse. A few of the mondern operating systems have something simular, but if you are still on Windows XP, you will love launchy as much as you love your keyboard. 😉

Since being a developer these days means writing scripting languages on linux, windows, and mac os you will need a great text editor that works in all three. jEdit is great because it runs in java, and thus works on windows, linux (ubuntu), and mac osx. It’s lighter weight than using eclipse and supports 30+ languages with syntax highligting. jEdit also has an easy to use plugin interface kinda like Firefox, that manages plugin installs, and plugin updates. When I set up jEdit, I usually set the tab ( buffer )controls up to be the same as they are in Firefox.

Firefox 3.5 is a huge speed improvement over 3.0, and it now supports all of your favorite dev plugins. One of these days, I will have to see if I can configure different FF Profiles to load different plugin sets. Maybe I would have one profile for speed, one for dev, and maybe one for demos.

Google Chrome is the fastest web browser, not just because the browser renders javascript at blazing speeds, but because the browser has several other optimizations in the user interface to make it light, powerful and fast. You can even use chrome with a choice of themes now, and change the default search engine to something other than Google’s, but who would want to use that? I use chrome whenever I don’t need all of the dev plugins loaded in FF.

I know a lot of you like the Apple app store, but for those of us that game, Steam is the best place to buy, download, and manage the updates for all of your video game needs. Steam, produced by Valve Software, allows you to buy a game through there small desktop client and then it will download it on your idle bandwidth, and update your games in the background. You basically never have to worrry about keeping your games or drivers uptodate again. I now hate it when I have to buy a game any other way. Oh, yeah the best part, no more annoying CD checks for games that you paid for. I love this service so much, I have rebought games just so I don’t have to manage them or deal with CD cracks any more. You can even gift games to your friends. 😉

At LA startupweekend I built with one other team member http://loc.is
a geolinking service that computes a geohash for gps coordinates or a
street address. The resulting geolink will provide a map, and some
other interesting information when a user clicks the link.

It’s kinda a little cobbled together, but by dec.3rd it should be working well.

I wonder if all of the the twitter bots are a result of people trying to gain free api access to twitter. Normal rules allow a certain number of requests per minute or or something. However if yo were to have 1,000 accounts, you could perform 1,000x that number of requests and searches per hour.

I bet if twitter looked for accounts that were performing high volumes of API requests, they would find accounts that were most likely linked to bots.

I am not yet sure if it is worth it for twitter to remove these accounts or if they are oddly good for the ecosystem.